Visions of an Emancipated Society: The Oberlin Mission, Black Activists, and Transnational Education, 1835-1875
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Mills, Shavonte
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 11, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Christina Snyder, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Ellen Stroud, Major Field Member
Kathyrn Merkel-Hess, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Esther Prins, Outside Unit Member
Michael West, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Raymond Gilyard, Outside Field Member - Keywords:
- Education
African American Studies
19th century U.S. history
Transnationalism - Abstract:
- My dissertation evaluates how emancipated Black communities in Oberlin, Ohio and Kingston, Jamaica navigated competing visions of freedom in the Oberlin Mission Complex. Black Oberlinians and Afro-Jamaicans widely demonstrated freedom as quality education, civic deliberation, financial security, removal from their enslaved past, and combating white supremacy. The Oberlin Mission Complex seemingly supported the Black communities’ visions. The complex consisted of white Oberlin alumni evangelicals who built schools and churches in emancipated Black communities; They hoped to convert their newly freed members to subscribe to their vision of an emancipated society which featured proscriptive a pedagogy of industrious citizenship. I argue that Black people appropriated the Oberlin Missions’ educational resources and spaces to amplify their understandings of freedom. Black communities challenged the Oberlin Missions’ social constructions of freedom as well as the limitations of Oberlin missionaries’ abolitionist politics. My archive consists of missionaries’ letters, school reports, textbooks, pamphlets, and newspapers. Although my archive was curated by the American Missionary Association, a predominately white organization, I prioritize centering African Americans and Afro-Jamaicans as active historical subjects in their emancipation processes. My work reveals two things: (1) Black communities used the schoolhouse to combat and critique restricted freedom, and (2) the transnational implications of the U.S.’s emancipation and Reconstruction processes.